Son, Unknown
by Leraiv Snape
Summary: Vader discovers the identity of the young Rebel that launched the successful strike against the Death Star.


Disclaimer: All things _Star Wars _now belong to Disney. This is done for fun, not profit.

Author's Note: This is a little exploration of Vader's reaction upon learning Luke's name and origins. It takes place shortly after Episode IV. This fic runs in direct contradiction to the conversation had in _The Empire Strikes Back _when the Emperor informs Vader that Luke is the son of Anakin – I believe it entirely likely that Vader knew beforehand. This is my version of what happens when he finds out.

Son, Unknown

The stars were no more than pinpoints of light outside _Executor_'s sheets of windows. Vader rolled his shoulders as well as he could, resisting the undignified urge to stretch like a dire-cat. His upper torso was the only part of his body that had remained fully intact all those years ago on Mustafar, and his shoulders still ached, even though it had been three weeks after his return from spending sixteen days confined in his TIE fighter.

Palpatine had felt the death of his technological terror instantly, and Vader, the Force echoing with the Emperor's rage, knew that his eight days out of contact in deep space had spared him the freshness of his master's wrath. By the time his report could be made, there was only a desire for revenge. Vader smiled thinly and painfully behind his mask. At least Tarkin was gone. Vader had learned since his arrival on his flagship that the Grand Moff had refused evacuation, secure in his confidence in the Death Star's defenses. It mattered little. Had he obeyed common sense and survived the explosion, he would have been executed for incompetence on Coruscant.

And with the instant death of all those responsible for the weaknesses of the station, there was only one target left for Palpatine's fury.

"_Discover the name of the young Rebel who destroyed the Death Star."_

"_As you wish."_

There had been hundreds of Rebels on the attack that fateful day. But Vader knew that there was only one that his master was seeking, only one that he would send Vader himself to find. The one who had taken – and made – the impossible shot that had destroyed the reactor, blown up the space station, and killed more than two million servants of the Empire.

The boy who had travelled into the heart of the battle station with Kenobi, escaping with the princess. The one who reverberated with the Force, a beacon calling to Vader even in the midst of battle. When Kenobi had fallen at his feet, the youth's grief had slammed through the Force like a boulder shattering the stillness of a pond, so strong, so immediate, so his own that the long-silent voice of Anakin Skywalker had, for a few seconds, shared in mourning the man who had been master, brother, best friend and most dangerous enemy.

Even now, stretching across the galaxy, Vader could occasionally glimpse faint blips of the boy's existence. His abilities were as yet untrained and untried, but his seething potential was powerful. The Rebellion had been born in the same breath as the Empire he served, and had struggled on for nearly twenty years without much hope of swaying more than a few dissidents.

But a real Force user…a Jedi…this was an asset the Rebellion had lacked. A few of their stronger leaders left cursory traces of the Force behind them, but none had flared with the raw talent of one worthy of training. The boy could rally many who half-remembered the ideals of the Order and would attract those too young to recall the faults of the bureaucratic and autocratic Council – those who had been raised on lies of bravery, justice and a galaxy at peace with itself. The romance of the blazing blue blade would do for the troublemakers what all the political rhetoric in the galaxy could not accomplish.

"Skywalker."

Vader's head snapped to the spy that had just entered his briefing room and the woman took a step back as the Sith Lord's abrupt turn from the viewing window promised violence.

_Skywalker. _

No one had uttered that name for almost twenty years. Other than his master, no one left knew the name of the weakling he had been. Even those who had known Anakin had never thought to see his face behind the mask of Darth Vader, the Emperor's right hand…

"My Lord?"

He could feel her sudden burst of fear, but the nondescript woman facing him kept her back straight and her face carefully sculpted to bland neutrality. It was a face that invited you to glaze over it, ignore the features, allow it to blend in with whatever background was handy at the time.

It was the face of one of his best spies. He would regret the necessity of killing her.

As if feeling the thread of her life hanging in the balance of this abrupt flare of Vader's mercurial temper, she took a deep breath through her nose and continued. "The identity of the young Rebel who destroyed the Death Star. His name is Skywalker. Luke Skywalker."

The Sith Lord's ire vanished as swiftly as it had arrived, doused roughly by an emotion he thought himself incapable of feeling for years: genuine and total shock.

_Luke Skywalker._

He could hear her voice in his head, the sound of eager laughter—

"_Qui-Gon? Ani…you would saddle a child with a name like that?"_

_Anakin mock-frowned at his wife. The suggestion had been half-hearted at best, born of their warm memories of the man who had defended Anakin's person and Padmé's sovereignty with his life. But she was right. It was a…peculiar mouthful. _

"_Well?" he murmured, nuzzling her curls and tracing patterns on her bared, gently-swelling belly with his flesh-and-blood hand. "If it's a boy, what do _you _want to name him?"_

_She was silent for a time, her eyes fixed on his fingers as they danced on her warm skin. "Luke," she finally said, rolling the name around in her mouth. "Let's name him Luke."_

And now his spy, with the same name on her lips, her voice cold and merciless as she offered the boy to death in the place of Padmé'sloving gift of life.

_Luke Skywalker._

Blood of his blood. A handsome, healthy boy from a time when Vader, too, had been whole and fair to look upon.

A Force-talented son. _Family_. He had not had family for decades. Certainly not now, when the whole of his life belonged to the Empire. Not with the Jedi. There were those who likened the Temple to home, their comrades to brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, but that had never been true for the boy from Tatooine. Not for Anakin Skywalker, who had arrived too old for proper Padawan training. Not for the Chosen One who, as he grew in power and perception, had realized that the Council wouldn't fully embrace or accept him, that he could never completely trust them in return. Not even with Padmé. He spent too much time off world to think of their Coruscant apartment as home, and their hidden marriage had strained their ability even to allow the other to become home. There had always been so much to risk with their exposure.

"_Now go. And don't look back."_

He had walked away from home at the age of nine. By the time he looked back, it was far too late. Home had died in his arms, swallowed by the heat and torture of Tatooine's vast desert and her brutal natives.

"…_don't look back."_

_No._ Vader wrenched himself from the fading recollections of that voice, a voice he'd not heard in a lifetime. Families were for the weak. They could be used against you. On that, the Sith and Jedi ironically agreed. And he would introduce nothing now that could threaten his place in the Empire, or give Palpatine a chance to replace him. Even if he were so inclined…despite the coincidence, this Skywalker was not his.

Like his beloved wife, his child was dead.

"_She's gone, my friend," the Emperor's voice washed over him, its gentleness doing nothing to ease the pain of his words. "She was too frail for such violence as you showed her." _

And his Luke – had it even been a boy – had not been born. When his mother had been buried in state on Naboo, the reports had contained detailed pictures of the ceremony, including close-ups of her beautiful face – and the rounded bump of her middle that would have been the proof that his hands had once flowed with something other than blood.

But he had not deserved such an honor. This was not Padmé's son. There had to be another branch, another family. Surely, in the entire galaxy, there would be more than one Skywalker.

"Homeworld?" he finally grated, knowing that the vocoder translating his ruined vocal chords would turn the sound neutral, masking his surprise and the unexpected grief that name brought with it.

"It's been difficult to find a definite answer to that one, my Lord," she answered immediately, showing neither surprise nor impatience for his long pause. "Some sources point to Corellia, where he was a co-pilot and smuggler alongside Captain Solo." A beat of hesitation. Her skepticism would be clear to one without the Force.

"You do not believe them."

"Captain Solo has an Imperial record," she replied. An impressive one, Vader knew. The Sith never paid mind to smugglers – they were desert rats that had always been a feature of the galaxy, and, until major adjustments could be made, always would be – but it was the _Millennium Falcon_, registered to one Captain Han Solo, that had blown him and his TIE Fighter clear of the Death Star's explosion weeks ago, and Vader had done his research in the long hours since.

"His co-pilot is a Wookie," Vader rumbled.

"Precisely," she answered smartly. "He was boarded less than a year ago and it was just the two of them. He _could _have gotten another crew member since, but everything we have on him indicates that he's hardly the type."

"Your other sources?"

"They indicate a different planet, my Lord, with a great deal more evidence than a tangential association with interstellar trash. There are records of a Lars moisture farm on Tatooine, with purchases made at the Tashi station and the spaceport Mos Eisley by a Luke Skywalker for the past several seasons, and the _Millennium Falcon _had berthed at Mos Eisley Spaceport just a couple of days before—" she continued, but Vader had stopped listening.

If his respirator did not automatically do the job for him, he would have stopped breathing.

"…_don't look back."_

Tatooine. Scrubbing desert sand, scorching heat and ruthless gangsters. His homeworld. And now the homeworld of this second Skywalker. Vader could hear the unwelcome voice of the ancient master of the Jedi Council as clearly as if Yoda were in the room. _"Luck? Heh. Coincidence, Padawan Skywalker? A Jedi's life is not defined by luck. Let yourself go, you must. Flow with the Force. See your 'coincidence' for what it truly is…"_

The reports had lied. His master had lied – at least at first. His son had survived. But why Tatooine? What – _who _– could have—

"…_records of a Lars moisture farm."_

"_Cliege Lars. Shmi is my wife." The older man was in a moving chair, his legs plainly useless after some accident or other. The desert was as unforgiving as Anakin remembered._

"_I don't want to give up on her…but she's been gone a month. There's little hope that she's lasted this long."_

_Anakin rose in a sudden motion. "Where are you going?" Owen asked?_

_The Jedi nearly snarled at the boy's confused tone. Was he deaf? Blind? They had all given up on her. But they were not Force-users and her son could no more leave his mother to her fate than cut off all his limbs._

"_To find my mother," he managed a barely-civil tone._

"_Your mother's dead, son. Accept that."_

_Anakin turned burning eyes on the man who claimed to have loved his mother, but had left her to suffer the brutality of the Tuskens. He was suddenly aware of the other man's infirmity, in the way his blood pumped through his neck, and how little a touch of the Force it would require for the Jedi to reach out and stop that blood…Padmé was watching him. He quelled the impulse, knowing she would not understand, that if he saved his mother, Shmi would not welcome her savior's death. Coward or not, Cliege _was_ his mother's husband._

His mother's death, his subsequent murderous fury – his first true headlong descent into the Dark – and their rush to save Kenobi (an irony Vader had reflected on many times in the years since) had long eclipsed his memory of the dry, sand-blasted house and the plain folk who lived there.

"_Don't look back."_

His stepbrother. The unrecalled remaining link to something he could have called family. But who would have known that? He himself had not thought of them until reminded by his spy.

It was certainly not to Tatooine that he had gone when his machine-enhanced body had recovered from the fires of Mustafar.

_He scheduled a flight to Alderaan as soon as his organs were stable within the confines of the suit that the Empire had used to piece him back together. _

_He had heard reports that she had come here during her final days. Queen Breha Organa, Padmé and Viceroy Organa had been good friends. He watched the beautiful green-blue-white globe grow in his vision, blind to the lush vitality of the world before him, longing only for some hint that there was something – anything – left of his darling wife. The wife he had betrayed his Jedi Master, his best friend, for. The woman he had finally turned on in anger._

He had been bitterly disappointed. Draped in the unrelieved black of his Sith attire, his voice deep and foreign to his own ears, he had commanded an audience with the queen, knowing it to be well outside the dictates of courtesy and even of protocol, but he had to know – he had to find out if there was some spark of her still burning—

"_She's dead, Lord Vader. The child died inside her." Breha's voice was frozen and merciless as the blackness of space as she confirmed his master's verdict. "She lost the will to live. There was nothing to be done."_

The accusation in her eyes had been terrible to behold, but Vader had been too sunk in his own misery to care overmuch what the rebellious queen thought of him. Now he picked over the agonizing memory, ignoring the pain of the past in his need to find a link to the present. They had lied. Someone, somewhere had to have known that Padmé had given birth…had they not known the child to be his? Their marriage had been a secret kept from all – even their dearest friends. Breha herself had been puzzled by his demands. Had something or someone managed to—?

_Kenobi_.

His gloved hand flexed. Of course. Kenobi had figured it out, all those years ago. The boy had left Tatooine with Kenobi. Had arrived on the Death Star with Kenobi. Had completed the task that the old Jedi had doubtless laid out for him. Had been taught to passionately hate his father.

Kenobi had taken his son and installed him in a house of essential strangers where his old master could doubtless keep an eye on him, waiting for him to grow, to become a perfect instrument of revenge.

_Jedi._ Their hypocrisy truly knew no bounds. The opinion he'd formed as a young man had only become entrenched over the years, and this deceit of Kenobi's, raising his son – _his _son! – to become a Rebel, to destroy Imperial lives, confirmed it yet again.

"The Lars farm is gone, my Lord, destroyed some days before the Death Star itself." His spy was continuing to report as he ruminated. "There were two human skeletons among the remains – one male, one female, both middle-aged."

Vader nodded sharply. The Empire had incinerated the farm and the farmers in their frantic search for the stolen plans inside a little astromech droid. The names of the owners of that desolate patch of rock had not struck him when he'd heard the report, but he could perfectly recall the routine check-in and the young officer who'd delivered it so efficiently.

They had traced the droid to the Lars farm. Despite interrogating and then killing the owners – confirmed as his stepbrother and Beru, the girl he'd met there briefly – they had not found the plans. And Luke Skywalker had clearly not died with them.

_My son. Luke…_he reached, his spy forgotten as he dove into the Force, stretching to brush his son's mind, eager, suddenly, not only for a faint echo that might indicate where the Rebels were, but what he was thinking, hoping illogically that his child, the surviving legacy from a lifetime of laughter, sunlight on his skin, Padméin his arms, was safe, was content…

Movement reminded him that she was there. Vader re-focused on her, and felt again the stab of regret. She had done her job well. It was not her fault that the information was so delicate that he could not risk her disseminating it further. The Empire was constructed of factions jockeying for power. As a Sith, he operated outside the rigid hierarchy, but he could not risk an ambitious underling finding out and interfering with the boy.

Or worse.

The only real threat to the sudden, shadowy plans streaming through his mind in response to her report was his master. The only person in the Empire she would answer to directly other than Vader was the Emperor. But the Dark Jedi also knew that he would not tell Palpatine that the Rebel they were seeking above and beyond all others was his son. The Emperor held too much power over his apprentice as it was. Vader had no intention of handing him this weapon, the last link he had to his wife.

_My son…_The image of his mother, her eyes gentle and compassionate, merged with the laughing features of his wife from a lifetime before sorrow and anger had made their indelible stamp on him. Vader felt his chest ache with an old pain and with the stirrings of something unfamiliar. He would find his child. Luke would join him. On his terms, not the Emperor's.

"You have done well," he said, and though his tone retained its depth, there was the softness of sorrow in it. "I am sorry."

He heard her draw a sharp breath, but, to her credit, she did not try to equivocate, or to run. "Lord Vader…you know I would not betray you."

"Except to the one we both call master," he answered almost gently. "I would not have him torture this from you – and I cannot let you tell him freely."

She closed her eyes, and he could feel fear, a desperate sense of injustice…and resignation. She had a whole galaxy to hide in, but it was not possible to truly escape Darth Vader. Assuming she made it off his Star Destroyer, she would spend the rest of her short life looking over her shoulder, waiting for him – or one of his assassins – to come for her.

"Why, my Lord?" she asked quietly as Vader mentally found the points in her jugular that would stop the blood to her brain.

Vader considered her. He seldom answered the questions of underlings – they were largely the blustering queries of those too insecure in their power to be trusted with the basic maintenance of a TIE fighter. But Jedrae hardly fell under that category, and she had the right to know what she was dying for, why she had to perish to protect such a secret. "Before I became…who I am now," he replied, "my name was Anakin Skywalker."

Her eyes grew huge. "Skywalker. The boy…?"

"My son, Jedrae."

A bitter smile touched the edges of her mouth, the cynicism in her eyes betrayed her understanding. "I wish you the best of luck, my Lord, in protecting him."

A tilt of his head. "You will be honored for your service."

"Thank you, my Lord." She drew a deep breath, closed her eyes, nodded sharply. Vader squeezed. She lost consciousness rapidly, almost painlessly, and death quickly followed as he cut off her air.

He lifted her body himself to take to the airlock. His summary and public executions of the incompetent officers that regularly endangered their crews barely rated his notice, but her death would spark the kinds of questions that fuel whispers, and he wanted no word of this to reach the halls of Coruscant's Imperial Palace.

He reached again as he strode the corridors, seeking the mind he had felt so strongly in the Death Star trench as his son blazed towards his goal. Failing to find it vibrating in the present, the memory of that first recognition, the discovery that the Rebellion had, at last, discovered a Force-user to fight for them, arrived in its stead.

"_The Force is strong with this one." _

_The x-wing slipped sideways in his sights, eluding his cannons. There were approaching the main shaft. The odds of a direct hit were so minimal as to be laughable – unless the gunner was initiated in the Force._

_Which this one seemed to be. Vader had never seen so strong a pilot, not since he, himself—_

_A pulse of confidence, so strong, so familiar, so like his own feelings as a child when he raced, swept through Vader's frame. The boy would fire. And he would hit home. _

_The x-wing lined up in his sensors. "I have you now."—_

—_the second of his guard suddenly exploded, shot from behind. The backlash caught his own TIE Fighter and spun Vader into space—_

_He could feel the boy's tension – the release – the elation of success—_

—_the silence of the Death Star. The same silence that had engulfed the Force after Alderaan. Completely at odds with the jubilant waves radiating from the successful Rebel._

_No Kenobi_, Vader thought, returning himself to the present as he sent his spy's body into space, satisfied and grimly pleased by his discovery, _you started him on his path, but now it is _I _who will complete his training, and together, we will bring much-needed order to the galaxy._

The Emperor occupied himself mainly now with manipulating the Force, seeking what he had once told Vader could be learned – how to keep others from dying. With Padmé's death, Vader had ceased to care about such things, but he would scour the galaxy for Luke, for the child that had been born of both of them, the one precious, living being who could carry her into the future. He recalled seeing the boy from a distance as he cut Kenobi down. Sandy-blond hair so like what had covered his head as a child. A small, slim build that would have come from her.

There was much to learn. Suddenly, that brief glimpse before hatred had twisted the young face – the only visual Vader had cared to have not a day ago – was no longer enough.

What color were his eyes? What shape his hands? What were his talents, his interests? He loved to race, felt the adrenaline thrill of battle – another aspect of Vader manifested by his son – but was he also at home in politics like his mother? Had he joined the Rebellion because Kenobi told him to, because it had been thrust upon him as it had been upon his mother, or to improve the galaxy, as Vader had so desperately wanted to change the Old Republic?

The Emperor would care only that Luke be brought to heel. Turned, killed or possibly both. Under his master's tutelage, there would be no time to discover what of Padmé was in the boy, and what of Anakin, what he dreamed of for the future, what he longed to attain.

The key to successfully using the Dark Side was in such subtleties. Raw power was only a part of it. In time, Vader would help his son understand that the Dark Side was the path to attain the change he sought, to create a different and better galaxy.

Perhaps one where the Emperor himself was gone, and they could put the vast Imperial machine to work for the many problems that had grown no better since the collapse of the Republic.

Returning to his quarters, Vader pulled up every record that could be found on the Lars farm and Mos Eisley spaceport, launching his search to piece together the childhood his son had had without him. He locked the channels and used multi-encrypted transmissions as he sent questing tendrils across the galaxy.

There could be no chance that another would discover what Jedrae had already died for. No risk – however small – that might lead Palpatine to his son and destroy whatever chance Vader had of coming to know him, to teach him, to _be_ the father he had so briefly fantasized about being nearly twenty years ago.

Sitting back in his chair, the Sith allowed himself to slip into meditation, seeking the brilliance of Luke's Force-presence, reaching—

It burst on the edge of his perception, a small star going nova. Vader reached for his comm, signaling the bridge.

_I am coming for you, my son. _

Nothing, and no one, would stand in his way.

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A/N: As usual, please review and let me know what you think!


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